Travels From The Monk That Lives in My Phone

http://boboandchichi.com/2015/08/travels-from-the-monk-that-lives-in-my-phone/?repost=1

by brudgers • 11 years ago

83 25 11 years ago

kripy• 11 years ago

A similar thing happened to me when I lost a phone in Vietnam. I ended up having to remotely nuke the phone in order to stop the photos when a few images came through of a family visiting a grave. Too creepy.

iak8god• 11 years ago

I wonder how common/repeatable this is, and what the minimum requirements are for a device to get picked up and used this way. It might be an interesting art project for someone to plant a few tens of cheap smartphones around, assuming we could reasonably expect at least several of them to broadcast interesting slices of people's lives.

afhammad• 11 years ago

I was thinking the exact same thing

davidrusu• 11 years ago

So when they sync with iCloud wouldn't the monk get their photos?

hakcermani• 11 years ago

Nice attitude (and gift of pictures ) on loosing your ipod !

juandopazo• 11 years ago

There was a slightly surreal version of a similar story published to BuzzFeed some time ago http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/i-followed-my-stolen-iphone-a...

userbinator• 11 years ago

The lack of any apparent attempt at reconfiguring/personalising a device you find and don't intend to return, but instead what seems to be just regular use, must be due to a very different attitude/knowledge about computers in general. It's a very interesting story though.

rokhayakebe• 11 years ago

This idea of returning things you found does not exist everywhere. I know places where if you found something you would look up and thank the heavens for looking out for you today. You would not think that someone lost something, but rather that someone upstairs brought you a gift.

rahimnathwani3• 11 years ago

This guy is posting someone else's private photos on the internet, without the person's knowledge or consent. That's not cool.

mondoshawan• 11 years ago

Someone else's private photos. Taken on a stolen iPod. Using stolen credentials.

I fail to see how these photos are private.

arrrg2• 11 years ago

Two wrongs don't make a right?

You act as though you could apply some simple legal test to this essentially ethical question. I think it's very hard to make an ethical case for sharing photos someone made (with an extremely high likelihood of) not knowing they would be public for entertainment purposes.

Private photos are private photos, even if made by a thief and they don't suddenly become public because the thief accidentally shares them with someone. When I accidentally share photos with someone I sure hope they would tell me about it and not share them with the world.

callesgg• 11 years ago

I aggre, the monk has clearly "chosen" to share them to the writer.

The monk has a number of options:

1. Reset the iPod(which he cant do cause it requires an appleId password),

2. Dont take pictures with the Ipod.

3. Disable icloud sync.(i think one can do that with out authentication)

4. Dont use the Ipod.

5. Use it and share the pictures.

He has clearly "chosen" nr 5.

I know this is controversial but in my mind if you fuck up it is up to you to "fix" it. It's capitalism.

notahacker• 11 years ago

The author openly acknowledges they left the phone behind by mistake in a position where they weren't able to attempt to retrieve it, and we have absolutely no reason to assume any ill-intent on the part of the teenage monk that appeared to have started using it weeks later.

(Though, that said, I suspect that monk in question would be unlikely to be especially upset to find the photos online, having quite happily posed for plenty of photos with falangs who presumably had their own cameras anyway.)

stephth• 11 years ago

It wasn't stolen, it was lost and found. [1]

And for the credentials part, you're assuming a certain amount of technical knowledge and interest for iPod features beyond the basics.

[1] Relevant, from this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10247974

GFK_of_xmaspast• 11 years ago

Desire to protect ones intellectual property is still a thing which leads to dukkha.

morgante• 11 years ago

Sorry, I don't think you have much of a right to expect privacy when using someone else's iPod without permission.

rahimnathwani3• 11 years ago

In the UK, if you find something of value, you can take to the police station. The police give you a receipt. If no one has claimed the item after some period of time (3-6 months?) then you can go back and collect it. You did your best.

Let's say I come into possession of an iPod touch that way. Should I still have no right to privacy?

clamprecht• 11 years ago

Interesting in a voyeuristic way. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to "tap in" to someone else's photos across the world, in exchange for making your own photos available for one and only one other person to tap into? Like a one-way chatroulette for photos.

icebraining2• 11 years ago

This exists, it's called Rando.

EDIT: was, apparently it was killed after some guy wrote a script to spam the same image.

douche• 11 years ago

Was it by any chance a certain ahem iconic piece of artwork from 4chan?

jccalhoun• 11 years ago

Interesting situation. I really hate this kind of writing though because I wish it would just start with "I lost my ipod touch and now some guy is using it to post pictures on my timeline" instead of being mysterious and trying to build suspense.

Maybe I'm too impatient.

kf5jak• 11 years ago

I feel we should be more productive and focus on finding a way for the owner to get a message to the monk instead of debating copyright...

icebraining2• 11 years ago

You can use iCloud to send messages to your devices, it should be easy enough: http://osxdaily.com/2011/11/18/send-a-message-to-an-iphone-i...

Travels From The Monk That Lives in My Phone

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